Month: September 2006

My firsts tasks was about obtain a good debian package for Fisterra, and then add documentation to the page. A good amount of developer manuals, installation manuals, and examples are important to understand a huge project, and Fisterra is a really huge one. This is important too to get a good comunity of people working on it (we are searching help, join us! 🙂 )

But recently, in a conversation with Alex, another Igalo, introduce me one technology: Internet Communications Engine, or sortly, Ice. Ice pretends to be a middleware similar to CORBA or COM. This was developed by ZeroC, a company founded by experienced CORBA developers. The idea is get a better middleware than CORBA. As ZeroC says, “we neither wish to start a “CORBA vs. Ice” flame war nor do we want to discredit CORBA. On the contrary, we believe that CORBA was a great achievement for its time, and obviously Ice borrows many good ideas from CORBA”. They only want to go to the next step.

I see the page and the features only a bit, but this looks great! And this was implemented by them himself, are complete, and are free (libre), using a GPL license.

Fisterra initially uses CORBA as the middleware for his communication layer, using the ORBit implementation. Then, adds support to SOAP, due some needs in a concrete project. And, what about uses Ice in Fisterra? This is a very interesting technology, and Fisterra was designed in a way that the comunication layer could be replace (this is a hard work, but not an IMPOSIBLE work), although the first task should be “it worth the effort?”. The next could be “we can use the three simultaneously?”.